ITS has decommissioned the platform that the University used for more than two decades for such cornerstone applications as processing help and computer repair tickets.
Carolina had used the BMC Remedy platform since 1998. The ITS Service Management Platform Team officially retired Remedy on April 15 after several years of progressively retiring individual applications after moving those functions to newer and better platforms.
All Remedy applications have now moved into the ServiceNow platform or other applications.
More efficient tools replace Remedy
Remedy handled nearly four million Request for Service tickets — 3,860,817 to be exact — during the 22 years of service, from 1998 to 2019.
Request for Service, the primary incident/request tracking application for many departments and units across campus, was one of the first applications to move over to ServiceNow. This was the cornerstone application that brought campus IT organizations together to design an application that worked for all between 1998 and 2019.
ServiceNow is a more efficient, transparent and accessible platform for automating business and support processes. Most notably, it’s the primary ticketing software for the University. To better utilize the ServiceNow platform and get more value out of the cost of running it, ITS’ initial plan was always to move the additional applications out of Remedy and into ServiceNow.
This aligns with the University’s strategic plan, Carolina Next. Having fewer platforms to run means less time, money and energy spent on running and maintaining multiple platforms. The ServiceNow platform leverages four key domains; technology, data, process, and organizational change capacity to successfully optimize operations digitally.
“With Remedy we had to architect relationships between the different applications as they were developed. In ServiceNow, those relationships are already part of the architectural platform which are based on ITSM recommended practices,” said David Smith, IT Service Management Platform Manager. In 1998, he launched the Remedy platform. He has worked on it ever since.
Remedy’s long history
ITS originally purchased Remedy as a supporting application for the Carolina Computing Initiative (CCI) in 1998. In 2000, the University wanted first-year students to come in with a CCI computer, and by 2004, Carolina wanted all students, faculty, and staff to have a CCI machine.
All departments and schools were to use Remedy for actions that required negotiation on business processes via a governance committee known as the Remedy Advisory Committee. The Remedy development team’s core function was to design applications that benefit all members and to ensure performance and scalability.
“By 2004, we had a mature Help Desk application (RFS), an intake application for incoming freshmen picking up their new computer (Ram Shop Invoice), an integration for automatic DHCP registration (when DHCP registration was necessary to connect to the network), and a Computer Repair Center application with web-service integration to the insurance provider,” Smith said.
“This provided a seamless experience for incoming students during student orientation, originally known as CTOPS,” he added. “Our claim to fame was that we were one of the few academic communities to unite on a single form that most of campus leveraged for ticket tracking. This was the steppingstone we leveraged to develop multiple scalable applications and integrations over the years.”
Remedy’s applications
In addition to Request for Service tickets, from 1998 to 2019, Remedy handled the following for the University:
- Change Plan, a change management application for IT organizations (1999 – 2019)
- School of Medicine Change Plan (2018 – 2019)
- System Registration, the hardware asset management tool for the Data Center Operations team (2009 – 2022)
- Ram Shop, the Student Stores application for registering CCI computers/devices (2000 – 2021)
- Ram Shop Repair, the Student Stores application for Apple computer repairs (2004 – 2021)
- Computer Repair Center app, a repair tracking and parts ordering system for the Computer Repair Center (2002 – 2021)
- Loaner Tracking, Loaner computer asset tracking application (2003 – 2021)
- RF-1 application, an administration request application for ITS (2010 – 2021)
- Project Tracking System, a lightweight project tracking application for campus with integrations to Change Plan and RFS (2001 – 2019)
- Inventory Tracking for ITS Classrooms and ITS Labs (InvTrack), asset management application for tracking classroom/lab assets (2011 – 2019)
- Integration with PeopleSoft billing, Computer Repair Center, Managed Desktop Support services, and Remedy licensing chargebacks.
As part of the decommissioning activities, data from Remedy has been loaded into the data warehouse for archival reporting purposes and will be available in Tableau as needed.
Goodbye, Remedy
The Remedy decommissioning is the end of an era, campus IT professionals have commented.
“Good governance, great people, many accomplishments over those years,” Smith said.